Raúl

Raúl is a 47-year-old man; his family consists of hi wife and three children aged 14, 17 and 20 years. He was raised his entire life in the countryside and thanks to his father learned to do agricultural work there; he has grown several types of potatoes and peas for the last 30 years. The borrower is a hardworking dedicated man for he works long days on his crops and sells the harvests he gets and has earned income that way to support his entire family.

He will use the requested loan to buy agricultural supplies (manure, insecticide, fertilizer, fungicide and potato and pea seeds) to continue with his crops and to yield larger harvests to sell. His main dream is to be able to expand his crops because he has land available to do so and thus increase sales of crops and generate higher income to provide better quality of life for his family.

Additional Information

More information about this loan

By funding this loan, you are promoting entrepreneurship in remote regions, including areas recovering from guerilla warfare in Colombia, and helping to reverse the rural exodus which occurred in the past decades when a the rural population fled their countryside homes for the safer cities.

This Kiva loan was created by Kiva's field partner Interactuar specifically for Kiva funding, in an effort to reach more borrowers in rural areas. Most of the Interactuar's lending operations are focused in urban parts of Medellin. But this loan product is designed to provide working capital to riskier agricultural businesses who have been traditionally excluded from the finance sector.

Important Information

This loan is structured on Kiva as a bullet loan, which means a single payment is required at the end of the loan term. By Colombian law, Kiva's partner Interactuar is required to offer borrowers loans with a variable interest rate that fluctuates with the market rate. Because fixed monthly payments are applied first to interest and then to principal, Interactuar is unable to predict upfront what portion of each repayment would go towards the loan principal. This creates a challenge with Kiva's system, which doesn't allow for unpredictable principal payments, and can result in some Interactuar clients appearing falsely delinquent. To remedy this, the loan has an end-of-term repayment plan on Kiva, but the borrower will continue scheduled monthly repayments to Interactuar, who will then pass along the principal amount to Kiva lenders. This means that you may see repayments made on this loan throughout the repayment term, as opposed to receiving repayment in full at the end of the loan term.